Trump’s flailing incompetence makes coronavirus even scarier

America’s pandemic response capabilities have been systematically dismantled.

By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Feb 25, 

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump visit the 

Taj Mahal in Agra, India, on February 24, 2020. 

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Late last week, the US government overruled objections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on an airplane with other healthy people.

The Trump administration swiftly leaked that the president was mad about this decision, and that nobody told him about it at the time. That could be true (or not — Trump and his team lie about things all the time). But even if it is true, it’s a confession of a stunning level of incompetence. The president is so checked out that he’s not in the loop even on critical decisions and is making excuses for himself after the fact.

Resolving interagency disagreements is his job. But Trump has never shown any real interest or aptitude for his job, something that used to loom large as an alarming aspect of his administration. That fear has faded into the background now that the US has gone years without many major domestic crises (the disasters and failed response in Puerto Rico being a big exception).

The Covid-19 outbreak, however, is a reminder that it remains a scary world and that the American government deals with a lot of important, complicated challenges that aren’t particularly ideological in nature. And we have no reason to believe the current president is up to the job. Trump not only hasn’t personally involved himself in the details of coronavirus response (apparently too busy pardoning former Celebrity Apprentice guests), he also hasn’t designated anyone to be in charge.

Italy has reported its fourth death from the new coronavirus, as the number of people contracting the virus continued to mount. Above, a woman in Milan with a face mask. Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images

Infectious disease response necessarily involves balancing a range of considerations from throughout government public health agencies and critical aspects of economic and foreign policy. That’s why in fall 2014, the Obama administration appointed Ron Klain to serve as “Ebola czar” — a single official in charge of coordinating the response across the government. Trump has, so far, put nobody in charge, even though it’s already clear that because of the coronavirus’s effect on major Asian economies, the virus is going to be a bigger deal for Americans.

The Trump administration has asked Congress for $2.5 billion in emergency funding to fight the outbreak. But this is just a fig leaf. The reality is this administration keeps trying to — and at times does — slash funding for relevant government programs.
Trump keeps slashing pandemic response

In 2005, during the H1N5 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development ran a program called Predict to identify and research infectious diseases in animal populations in the developing world. Most new viruses that impact humans — apparently including the one causing the Covid-19 disease — emerge through this route, so investing in early research is the kind of thing that, at modest ongoing cost, served to reduce the likelihood of rare but catastrophic events.

The program was initiated under George W. Bush and continued through Barack Obama’s eight years in office; then, last fall the Trump administration shut it down.

RELATED
“We are at a turning point”: The coronavirus outbreak is looking more like a pandemic

That’s part of a broader pattern of actual and potential Trump efforts to shut down America’s ability to respond to pandemic disease.
Trump’s first budget proposal contained proposed cuts to the CDC that former Director Tom Frieden warned were “unsafe at any level of enactment.”
Congress mercifully didn’t agree to any such cuts, but as recently as February 11 — in the midst of the outbreak — Trump proposed huge cuts to both the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.
Perhaps because his budget officials were in the middle of proposing cuts to disease response, it’s only over this past weekend that they pivoted and started getting ready to ask for the additional money that coping with Covid-19 is clearly going to cost. But experts say they’re still lowballing it.
In early 2018, my colleague Julia Belluz argued that Trump was “setting up the US to botch a pandemic response” by, for example, forcing US government agencies to retreat from 39 of the 49 low-income countries they were working in on tasks like training disease detectives and building emergency operations centers.
Instead of taking such warnings to heart, later that year, “the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure,” according to Laurie Garrett, a journalist and former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

As it happens, the Covid-19 problem arose from China, rather than from Africa, where the programs Trump shut down were working. But now that containment in China seems to have failed, the next big global risk is that the virus will spread to countries that have weaker public health infrastructure, from which it will spread uncontrollably — exactly the sort of countries where Trump has scaled back assistance.

Meanwhile, to the extent Trump has done anything in the midst of the crisis, his predominant focus seems to have been on reassuring financial markets, rather than on addressing the public health issue.
Trump picked a strange time to turn globalist

Austria, which borders northern Italy, is looking at reimposing border controls in light of the Covid-19 outbreak in several towns near Milan. Israel has taken action to bar all foreign nationals who have been to South Korea and Japan in the past 14 days from entering the country — adding to an existing ban on visitors from China.


The Israeli response, so far, is a bit of an outlier and perhaps has gone too far.

Still, it’s a bit strange that Donald Trump of all people has done so little to restrict travel at this point — you can book a direct flight from Beijing to Los Angeles tomorrow for $680 while Trump is busy expanding his anti-Muslim travel ban and crippling refugee resettlement based on made-up terrorism concerns.

Trump’s only public statements about this growing crisis are a weeks-old series of tweets in which he expressed confidence in Chinese leadership and said the problem would go away when the weather gets warmer. (Scientists say that may not be true.)

....he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2020

Now that the stock market is potentially crashing on coronavirus fears, maybe Trump will try to rouse himself to do something rather than underreacting for the sake of the Dow. But the biggest problem with Trump is it’s far from clear he really can pull himself together to do the job.
Trump is busy corrupting the American government

Over the past week, when the breakdown of some containment measures became known, Trump was busy replacing his director of national intelligence with an unqualified political hack who will also simultaneously serve as ambassador to Germany. It’s bad to have unqualified people in key roles, but the reason Trump did it is worse — Richard Grenell was installed after his predecessor Joseph Maguire got fired for briefing Congress about intelligence regarding Russian activities and the 2020 presidential election.

Trump felt the contents of Maguire’s briefing were politically embarrassing to him, and therefore wanted the information withheld.

That’s typical of Trump’s approach to governance — he sees the entire executive branch as essentially his personal staff, whose only obligation is to advance his personal interests.

President Trump, flanked by first lady Melania Trump and

 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, began a two-day 

visit to India with a “Namaste Trump” rally in Ahmedabad, 

on February 24, 2020. Money Sharma/AFP via Getty Images

But in a crisis, it can be good for the country for embarrassing information to come to light if that’s what it takes to provoke a stronger and more accurate response. Trump, however, has clearly signaled he does not think this is the right way to do things. Consequently, in the middle of the crisis, Trump’s national security adviser went on Sunday shows to smear Sen. Bernie Sanders, rather than provide credible information about the international situation to the public.

Trump is also busy having his Customs and Border Protection officials wield airport security as a tactical weapon against the population of New York when these are the people who we’ll need to screen travelers.

More broadly, Trump has a well-deserved reputation for dishonesty and has acted over the years to clean house of any officials (James Mattis, Dan Coats, etc.) who develop a reputation for contradicting him. It’s almost impossible to know how this administration could convey accurate and credible information to Americans in a crisis even if it wanted to.

The country has thus far muddled through with Trump at the helm better than Americans had any right to hope, but the emergence of the occasional crisis is a constant in government. And with the world on the brink of a potential disaster, it’s terrifying to contemplate the reality that the man in charge just isn’t up to the job.

The US Supreme Court just held that a border guard who shot a child will face no consequences 

Hernandez v. Mesa ends with a decidedly Trumpy result.

By Ian Millhiser Feb 25, 2020

US Border Patrol agents conduct a training exercise in the Anapra area. David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images


Hernández v. Mesa is a case about a horrific event.

Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca, a 15-year-old Mexican boy, was with his friends near the US-Mexican border when one of those friends was detained by US Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa. Hernández ran onto Mexican soil, and Mesa fired two shots at the boy — one of which struck him in the face and killed him.

Hernández and his family disagree about the events that led up to this shooting. The family says that Hernández and his friends were simply playing a game where they would run to the fence that separates the United States from Mexico, touch it, then run back to their own country’s soil. Mesa claims that Hernández and his friends threw rocks at him. (Significantly, the Justice Department has refused to take any action against Mesa.)

Regardless of who is telling the truth, the question in the Hernández case is whether Mesa is immune from a federal lawsuit even if he shot and killed Hernández in cold blood. The Supreme Court held, in a 5-4 decision along familiar partisan lines, that Mesa cannot be sued.

The case turns upon whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), which permitted federal lawsuits against law enforcement officers who violate the Constitution, has any real force in 2020. After Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Hernández, the answer to this question is a resounding “no.”

Alito’s opinion does not explicitly overrule Bivens, but it appears to be laying the groundwork for a future opinion that will eliminate Bivens’ protections against federal officers who violate the Constitution. Notably, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate opinion in which he argues that “the time has come to consider discarding the Bivens doctrine altogether.”

Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, briefly explained

The Constitution’s Bill of Rights places a number of restrictions on law enforcement, including the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But the Constitution is silent about whether an individual officer may be sued if they violate one of these restrictions. Although a federal law does permit suits against state law enforcement officers who violate “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws,” there is no such statute that explicitly authorizes suits against federal agents.

Nevertheless, Bivens held that the right to sue federal law enforcement is implicit in the Constitution. “Power,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the Court in Bivens, “does not disappear like a magic gift when it is wrongfully used.” An officer who acts unlawfully “in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own.” And thus the Constitution must offer a remedy to victims of such rogue officers.

Bivens, in other words, rests on something comic book fans will recognize as the Spider-Man rule — with great power comes great responsibility. If the federal government gives someone a badge and a gun, and that person unconstitutionally abuses that power, then they may be held accountable for their actions and can be ordered by a court to compensate their victim.

But Bivens fell into disfavor not too long after it was decided, in large part because the Supreme Court took a sharp right turn.

“For almost 40 years,” Alito writes in Hernández, “we have consistently rebuffed requests to add to the claims allowed under Bivens.” When faced with a Bivens claim, the Court typically looks for reasons why the most recent case is “different in a meaningful way from previous Bivens cases decided by this Court.” If it is, the Court will dismiss the lawsuit if there are any “special factors counselling hesitation.”

Much of Alito’s opinion is a laundry list of reasons why the courts should hesitate to allow suits against border patrol agents involved in a cross-border shooting.

“The political branches, not the Judiciary, have the responsibility and institutional capacity to weigh foreign-policy concerns,” Alito claims, and “a cross-border shooting is by definition an international incident.” Thus, it is better for these incidents to be resolved through international diplomacy, rather than through a lawsuit.

Similarly, “the conduct of agents positioned at the border has a clear and strong connection to national security.” These agents “detect, respond to, and interdict terrorists, drug smugglers and traffickers, human smugglers and traffickers, and other persons who may undermine the security of the United States.” Allowing suits against these agents risks “undermining border security.”

Alito’s opinion, in other words, rests on a kind of anti-Spider-Man rule. Border patrol agents are given great power so that they can use that power. And it is not typically the job of the courts to interfere with how those guards exercise such power — even when it results in the death of a child.

Bivens is probably in its final days

The striking thing about Alito’s opinion is the sheer amount of ink he spills presenting Bivens as an anomaly that’s since been rejected by a new line of decisions. Bivens suits are “a ‘disfavored’ judicial activity,” and the Court has even suggested that if its previous decisions applying a Bivens remedy were “decided today” that it is “doubtful we would have reached the same result.”

Alito also suggests that Bivens does not show sufficient “respect for the separation of powers.” According to his Hernández opinion, “when a court recognizes an implied claim for damages on the ground that doing so furthers the ‘purpose’ of the law, the court risks arrogating legislative power.” If individual plaintiffs are to be given the right to sue law enforcement agents for constitutional violations, that right must be given by Congress, and not the courts.

Setting aside the fact that there are court cases stretching back at least 200 years holding that government actors may be sued when they violate the law, Alito’s view of the separation of powers is debatable. The Supreme Court, after all, established very early in American history that “it is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is,” and no one can reasonably question that the Fourth Amendment places limits on what law enforcement officers do with their weapons.

The question in cases like Bivens is whether the Fourth Amendment means anything — especially in cases where the government refuses to discipline an officer who steps out of line — or whether the right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures necessarily implies that there must be some way to enforce that right.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hernández transforms the Bill of Rights into a paper tiger in many cases involving law enforcement overreach. And it foreshadows a future where Bivens is overruled in its entirety.

The coronavirus cruise ship outbreak confirms cruises are bad
YOU DON'T NEED CORONAVIRUS TO PROVE THIS, 

ANY OLD NOROVIRUS WILL DO

Disease spread — along with environmental destruction and sexual assault allegations — is just one of the arguments against cruising.

By Aditi Shrikantaditi@vox.com Updated Feb 25, 2020

The quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship at Daikoku 

pier cruise terminal in Yokohama on February 24, 2020. 

KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images

This piece originally published on November 15, 2018. It has been updated to account for the February 2020 coronavirus cruise ship outbreak. You can see all of our coronavirus coverage here.

Off the coast of Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, floated the Diamond Princess, a luxury cruise ship that claims to be a “treasure trove of exceptional delights.” On board were steakhouses, spas, a 700-seat theater, and the highly contagious, rapidly spreading coronavirus. Of the 3,711 passengers and crew members on board, 695 have reported contracting the virus (almost one-fifth of the ship’s manifest). It is the largest coronavirus outbreak outside of China and it happened on a ship operated by the most profitable cruise line in the world, Carnival Corp.

The first reported incident was from a guest who traveled for five days on board the ship, from January 20 to January 25, before disembarking in Hong Kong. He was diagnosed with coronavirus on February 1. Symptoms may not appear for as long as two weeks after exposure, according to the CDC, meaning the passenger might have contracted and spread the virus while on board.

According to reporting by the New York Times, Hong Kong officials had alerted the Japanese health ministry of the infected passenger on February 2, a day before the ship was scheduled to dock. A spokeswoman from Princess Cruises says they only received “formal verification” on February 3 and then notified the passengers. What commenced after the announcement was the opposite of luxury: two weeks of quarantine in passenger rooms, the least expensive of which have no windows.

Exhaustive coverage of this specific outbreak has illuminated what a bastion of disease cruises can be. But even before this incident threatened the $45 billion industry, cruises were always both popular and divisive.

The number of people who cruise has increased every year for the last 10 years, and 32 million people are expected to cruise this year, according to data from Statista. And it’s not just seniors who are interested. A study by the Cruise Line International Association found that the demographic with the highest growth in bookings is people ages 30 to 39. From 2016 to 2018, this demographic booked 20 percent more cruises. The CLIA 2020 report found that 71 percent of millennials have a more positive attitude toward cruising than they did two years ago.


Despite steadily climbing ticket sales and evidently broader appeal, there remains a vocal contingent of anti-cruisers — people who take pride in saying they would never book one, citing their refined tastes and disdain for being ferried from port to port on a floating amusement park.

But there are bigger problems than being trapped in a consumerist funhouse. As recent events have indicated, cruises can be bastions of disease. Ships can also be dangerous, with high sexual assault rates, frequent poisonings, and the ever-present possibility of going overboard. And, of course, cruises are horrible for the environment: Their heavy and growing use of fossil fuels means someone on a seven-day cruise produces the same amount of emissions as they would during 18 days on land. And they can damage fragile ocean ecosystems due to practices like irresponsible disposal of sewage.
Cruises are regimented and creepy

In his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” first published by Harper’s in 1996, David Foster Wallace describes his cruising experience as a “special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under the configurations of the verb ‘to pamper.’”

Through the piece, he exhaustively recalls every event, person, and feeling he has during his seven-night voyage on the ship he rechristens “the Nadir.” His experience gets to the heart of what is so insulting about what a cruise offers — you are told what to eat, what will entertain you, what will relax you, all in the name of “luxury.” Instead of creating serenity, the repetition of activities can be quite maddening, no matter how much you may like unlimited lobster or the thrill of slot machines. A trip without agency feels too Wall-E-esque to be peaceful.

Even cruise enthusiasts recognize how limiting the onboard activities are. Miami resident Carolyn Smith has been on 32 cruises since 2002 and says being a captive audience has led others she knows to hate cruising. “While on a land-based vacation, you can branch out for meals and other events from your hotel or resort; at sea on a cruise ship, that is not an option,” she says. “I have friends who never cruised again for this exact reason. I have actually heard comments like, ‘I didn’t enjoy feeling like I was being herded like cattle!’”
Crime is rampant on cruises

The creepy captivity of cruises is actually not the most potent case against them. Ross Klein, a Canadian academic, studies corruption surrounding cruise corporations and logs all the misfortune that happens on and off board.

Although he is blacklisted from many cruise lines for publishing information from his studies in books and on his website CruiseJunkie.com, Klein says his website has no agenda other than to report the facts. In fact, as a former cruise enthusiast, he doesn’t find his site inflammatory at all. “My page is not anti-cruising; it’s just information you won’t find at the cruise line website,” he says.

Visit the site (Klein denies its name was chosen to troll cruise-lovers), and you are confronted with the Comic Sans header “cruisejunkie dot com your resource for the other information about the cruise industry.” Below that are a handful of links such as “Persons Overboard, 1995 - 2018” and “Ships that have Sunk, 1979 - 2013,” which lead readers to charts with staggering numbers.

Since 2000, apparently 322 people have gone overboard or just went missing while cruising. Klein says about 20 percent of those who go overboard are rescued.

On the night of October 18, a crew member on Celebrity Reflections went overboard, but no one searched for them until the next morning. In May, a 50-year-old Carnival Paradise passenger went missing. After searching for 55 hours, the Coast Guard called off the search; the man has still not been found. In January 2015, a Mexican newspaper reported that a Disney cruise ship rescued a passenger who had fallen overboard from a Royal Caribbean cruise. Royal Caribbean had not even noticed a passenger missing.


In 2011, a cruise waiter on Costa Atlantica threw himself overboard and was found face down in the water, dead. Apparently, he was being investigated for sexual assault at the time of his death, which was suspected to be a suicide. And sexual assault is a problem on cruise ships. As of September 30, there were 60 reported sexual assaults this year on cruise ships, according to the Department of Transportation. NBC noted a 2013 congressional report found that minors were victims in one-third of assaults.

Jim Walker, a maritime lawyer, echoed that statistic on his site Cruise Law News, writing that most reported cases are not investigated. According to his site, one-third of the 100 victims he has represented in the past 15 years were minors. He writes that one of his clients was drugged and raped by a cruise line bartender. The employee was fired but then hired again to Princess Cruises. Walker contacted Princess Cruises’ in-house legal team and informed them they had hired a rapist, and the man was fired once again.
Cruises shake down local economies — and their own workers

Grandeur of the Seas is a Royal Caribbean ships that has been in service since 1995. It holds more than 2,400 passengers. Roger W/Flickr/Creative Commons

Klein is also the author of the book Cruise Ship Squeeze, which details how cruises take advantage of local economies. As opposed to working with the places they port, many cruises invest in terminals that only benefit their own economic interests.

According to Klein’s book, cruises threaten to boycott destinations if they attempt to raise their port charges, which can be as little as $1 per person. In 2004, the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Associations’ 12 members threatened to boycott Antigua and Barbuda because the countries raised their port charges to $2.50 per person. The threat worked, and the ports backed off.

Another way cruises turn a large profit is by investing in port terminals. For example, in Belize, Royal Caribbean invested $18 million for co-ownership of the Fort Street Tourism Village. The port charge is $5 per person, $4 of which goes to Tourism Village, meaning Royal Caribbean recouped its money in six to seven years.


When a ship docks for a few hours, cruise lines give passengers suggestions of what to do with their time before returning to the boat. But instead of offering sincere recommendations, cruise lines employ a certain pay-to-play model in which vendors on the island can pay to be recommended.

Crew members are known to be overworked, which, according to Klein, is because cruise ships are not beholden to US labor laws. According to Cruise Law News, crew members could work 10 to 12 hours a day for up to 10 months of the year. “If you’re a cleaner on the Grandeur of the Seas, there are 35 public bathrooms,” he says. “You’re making about $560 a month and you may have an assistant, you may not.”

According to CruiseCritic.com, a laundry attendant makes $700 month, a cabin steward makes between $650 and $1,150 per month, including tips, and a kitchen cleaner may make as little as $600 per month. Wages for customer-facing jobs are often dependent on gratuities. Crew members in housekeeping or food and beverage may only be promised $2 a day, and tips often make up 95 percent of their income. CruiseCritic.com also notes that these numbers may change based on where the crew member is from.

By registering their companies in foreign countries, cruise lines are able to dodge not only corporate income tax but reasonable labor laws. Royal Caribbean is incorporated in Liberia, where the minimum wage is $4 to $6 per day, Carnival in Panama, where the minimum wage ranges from $1.22 to $2.36 per hour, and Norwegian in Bermuda, where there is currently no minimum wage (although one will be implemented starting in May 2019).

“Carnival will earn $3 billion and they’ll pay no corporate income tax at all,” Klein says. “That’s $3 billion net profit. Why would they want to pay their workers a little extra money and make only $2.9 or $2.8 billion?”

Klein’s website also aggregates how much each cruise line spends on lobbying; from 1997 to 2015, Carnival has spent $4.7 million, Royal Caribbean has spent $10 million. Last year, three cruise lines donated a combined $23,500 to an Alaskan senator who then ensured a tax exemption for ships stopping in Alaska.
Cruises dump fuel and human waste into the ocean

Black smoke rises from Sun Princess, a Princess Cruises 

operated ship. Jason Thein/Flickr/Creative Commons

(BUNKER OIL)

Along with the moral implications of low wages and high profits and how little ports benefit from cruise tourism, the cruise industry has a severe impact on the environment. These ships are essentially floating cities, and many of them produce as much pollution as one. In 2016, the Pacific Standard reported that “each passenger’s carbon footprint while cruising is roughly three times what it would be on land.”

Traditionally, ships use diesel engines, gas turbines, or a combination of both. Diesel fuel is linked to pollution as it produces nitrogen oxide emissions, which have been linked to respiratory disease and lung cancer. Their high sulfur content is also harmful to the environment since sulfur, when mixed with water and air, forms sulfuric acid — the main component of acid rain. Acid rain can cause deforestation, destroy aquatic life, and corrode building materials. But recently, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) announced that all vessels must switch to cleaner fuel with a lower sulfur content by 2020.


However, instead of paying for more expensive but less sulfuric fuel, such as liquefied natural gas, ships are installing “emission cheat” systems, called scrubbers. A scrubber allows a ship to wash cheap fuel and meet the IMO requirements, then discharge the pollutants from the cheap fuel into the ocean.

This will just add to the fact that a 3,000-person cruise ship generates 210,000 gallons of sewage weekly. All cruise ship sewage goes through what is called “sewage treatment,” where solid and liquid waste is separated and sterilized, then the solid is incinerated and the liquid is released back into the ocean.

Apparently, it’s just like clean water. But in 2016, Princess Cruises was fined $40 million for polluting the ocean by dumping 4,227 gallons of “oily waste” off the coast of Britain. According to Klein’s website, just this September, two cruise lines were charged with “unauthorized discharge of untreated graywater,” or a stream of sewage that comes from everywhere but the toilet.

The two most popular cruise lines, Royal Caribbean and Carnival, both received a D score from environmental advocacy group Friends of Earth, which tabulated the score based on sewage treatment, air pollution reduction, water quality compliance, and transparency.

Cruises are unique in their negatives but also their positives. What else ferries you to and from picture-perfect destinations in a vessel dedicated to pampering its inhabitants? But what else can incubate a deadly virus to so many people so quickly?

Experts say that the cruise industry will bounce back from the coronavirus news as many cruise fans may well just elect to ignore all the aforementioned dangers and repercussions.

Besides, Princess Cruises has already put out a “Help Wanted” ad for a “best-in-class cleaning and disinfection service provider.” Meaning the exact ship where almost 700 people contracted coronavirus will resume voyages, carrying hot tubs, buffets, and thousands of passengers. But hopefully, and with help, without the virus.

HARRY TRAVELS TO SCOTLAND BY TRAIN AFTER FLYING FROM CANADA 

FOR HIS ECOTOURISM CONFERENCE 

MIXES WITH THE HOI POLLOI 

NOT QUITE 

THE LADS WITH HIM ARE SAS, SPECIAL FORCES UK MILITARY,

NOT SCOTLAND YARD, RCMP, OR GREEN BERETS 

DEADLIER REAL ROUGH TRADE 

KILL YA BEFORE YOU CAN SAY HI HARRY

 Prince Harry has touched down in the U.K.!

© Provided by People SplashNews.com

After relocating with wife Meghan Markle and 9-month-old son Archie to Canada’s Vancouver Island following the couple’s decision to step down from royal life, Queen Elizabeth‘s grandson was spotted in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Tuesday. He is taking part in a working summit in support of his environmental tourism initiative, Travalyst, in the Scottish capital on Wednesday.

Keeping with the organization’s mission, Harry chose a sustainable method of travel — train. He arrived at the Edinburgh Waverley railway station dressed casually in jeans and a baseball cap. The father, 35, also wore a green backpack and carried a suit bag.

Wednesday’s outing marks Prince Harry’s first high-profile event in the U.K. since his unprecedented decision to step back from frontline royal duties in January.

Launched in September, Travalyst aims to help both companies and consumers adapt their travel habits to benefit the environment and destination communities. The Edinburgh event will see Harry work with more than 100 members of the Scottish tourism and travel industry to iron out the practical details of just how this can be achieved

Hosni Mubarak’s death and despotic rule, briefly explained

The former dictator died Tuesday at age 91. 

Here’s a brief look back at his legacy.

By Danna Takritidanna.takriti@voxmedia.com Feb 25, 2020

A file photo dated on April 13, 2013 shows Former President of Egypt Hosni Mubarak is seen during his trial in Cairo, Egypt. He died on Tuesday at the age of 91. Mohammed Hossam/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images


Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long-time former dictator, died Tuesday at the age of 91.

To understand just what a huge role Mubarak played in Egypt, you need to go back to January 25, 2011.

On that Tuesday, thousands of demonstrators packed the streets of Cairo’s central Tahrir Square demanding Mubarak’s removal from office, as they had done every day for over two weeks.

“All of us, one hand, asking for one thing: leave, leave, leave,” the protesters sang.


But after 18 long, painful days of protest, Mubarak stepped down. The revolution had succeeded.

The protests were motivated by a variety of grievances including arbitrary government arrests, widespread poverty, extreme economic inequality, the rising prices of goods, and rampant unemployment among the middle and lower classes.

In the years before the protests began, Amnesty International reported that the government “continued to use state of emergency powers to detain peaceful critics and opponents. … Torture and other ill-treatment remained widespread in police cells, security police detention centers and prisons, and in most cases were committed with impunity.”

To put it simply: The people were tired of the ruling government’s abuse and corruption, and they demanded change.

Egyptian demonstrators protest in central Cairo to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and calling for reforms on January 25, 2011. Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

Like the rest of the revolutions in the region that came to be known as the Arab Spring, the protests against Mubarak were met with immense violence from the government’s security forces.

During the demonstrations, the Egyptian security forces killed at least 840 protestors and injured numerous others according to an Amnesty report. The fatalities included deaths by snipers at the hands of Egyptian police. All in just 18 days.


The brutality continued until Mubarak’s then-Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that the dictator had finally stepped down from office.
Who was Hosni Mubarak, and what is the “state of emergency law” that he imposed?

Mubarak’s long journey to becoming Egypt’s longtime dictator essentially began with the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Mubarak was Sadat’s vice president at the time, and found himself unexpectedly thrust into the leadership role.

After he took office, Mubarak reimposed a “state of emergency law” in the country that granted the government the power to restrict freedom of assembly, arrest anyone deemed suspicious and try them in “special” state security courts, and monitor and confiscate publications, among other things.

The law — which remained in place for the next 30 years (as did Mubarak) — allowed for corruption and political repression to sweep the nation. The 2010 death of Khaled Said, an activist whom many deemed the “martyr of the state of emergency,” provides an instructive look at how the law enabled brutality in Egypt.

According to a report by Amnesty International, police dragged the 28-year-old Said out of an Internet café in Alexandria and beat him in public until he died. This prompted protesters to take to the streets, chanting: “We are all Khaled Said.”

The removal of the emergency law is one of the many things that the protestors demanded in 2011.
The corruption and abuses didn’t end after Mubarak stepped down

In 2012, Mubarak received a life sentence for his crimes, but that was later overturned in an appeals court for lack of evidence. Later, in 2014, he was again put on trial and sentenced to three years in prison — not for all of the above atrocities, but for embezzlement. He was released in 2017.

Although the public succeeded in defeating Mubarak, they didn’t succeed in defeating government corruption and abuse. The current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is seen as continuing Mubarak’s legacy.

On June 30, 2012, Mohammed Morsi, took office as Egypt’s fifth president after he beat his opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, in the country’s first democratic elections. His time in office didn’t last long, however. Just one year later, on July 3, 2013, he was removed in a coup led by al-Sisi, who then was the Egyptian army chief general.

Al-Sisi resigned from the military and ran in the 2014 elections. He was sworn into office on June 8, 2014.

According to a 2015 report by Human Rights Watch, “since al-Sisi came to power, the authorities have continued to aggressively enforce a de facto protest ban and routinely dispersed anti-government demonstrations with force.”

“Under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s regular police and National Security officers routinely torture political detainees with techniques including beatings, electric shocks, stress positions, and sometimes rape,” reads another Human Rights Watch report from 2017.

Despite this, al-Sisi ran for a second term in 2018 and won 97 percent of the vote, with “little to no opposition” in the elections.

But on September 20, 2019, demonstrators once again took to the streets of Egypt to protest a president they view as another corrupt figure.

And, unsurprisingly, the government responded with force.

Amnesty International reported that “the Egyptian security forces have carried out sweeping arrests of protesters, rounded up journalists, human rights lawyers, activists, protesters and political figures in a bid to silence critics and deter further protests from taking place.”

To this day, nine years after Mubarak stepped down, the politics of Egypt remain corrupt, and the public remains unhappy with the person at the top.

Why Twitter says Bloomberg’s fake Sanders tweets don’t break its rules

The Bloomberg campaign’s controversial tweets fictitiously quoting Bernie Sanders, briefly explained

By Shirin Ghaffary Feb 25, 2020 VOX

Facing criticism, the campaign of Mike Bloomberg deleted a series of fictitious quotes by Bernie Sanders, which the campaign said was satire. Getty Images
IT WAS A JOKE EXCUSE

On Monday, presidential hopeful and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s campaign posted — and then deleted — several controversial tweets about rival Sen. Bernie Sanders that prompted confusion and tested the rules of what political campaigns can share on social media.

The tweets, which Bloomberg’s campaign called satire, featured fictitious quotes attributed to Sanders, in which Sanders appeared to praise dictators like Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin, with the hashtag “#BernieonDespots.”

While the tweets are now gone, people are continuing to debate social media companies’ responsibilities when it comes to policing political speech online. Though Twitter and other platforms have implemented rules that limit the sharing of certain types of political misinformation, controversy abounds.

The Bloomberg campaign posts are another example of how much confusion exists online about what’s true and what’s not, and what’s the difference between a joke or an attack — and how finding a clear answer often depends on context and nuance that doesn’t always come through clearly in a tweet or a Facebook update.

The Bloomberg campaign just tweeted out 6 fake/mock quotes attributed to Bernie Sanders.

Then, in a separate tweet, the campaign said that "to be clear" the tweets were satire.

Has Twitter commented on whether the string of tweets violate its policies on misinformation? pic.twitter.com/g8pPL8YyYV— Hamza Shaban (@hshaban) February 24, 2020

With the Bloomberg campaign’s tweets about Sanders, for example, the account followed up on the thread by tweeting, “To be clear — all of these are satire — with the exception of the 60 Minutes clip from last night.” (Sanders recently said on the CBS program that he opposes the authoritarian regime of Cuba’s late Fidel Castro, but that it’s “unfair to simply say everything is bad” about the leader, such as a mass literacy program he implemented).

To many, it was obvious these tweets were an attempt at a joke. But others criticized the Bloomberg campaign for posting what they saw as a misleading attempt to smear Sanders using fabricated quotes.

When the series of tweets were viewed together, it was more obvious that they were satirical. But the fake Sanders quotes appeared on some people’s Twitter feeds in isolation — lacking context, seemingly serious to some, and all the more confusing. It’s just one of several recent instances where Bloomberg’s tweets, sponsored memes, and other social media activity have tested the boundaries about what is allowed on social media

Not sure who's running this twitter feed, but these aren't real quotes & it's misleading for them to be in quotation marks. You might think the "joke" is obvious but a lot of people on the internet won't know it's satire. This is how disinformation spreads https://t.co/6TCATqsD2n— Clare Malone (@ClareMalone) February 24, 2020

Even when they’re not being satirical, politicians generally have a lot of leeway in what they can say on social media without violating company rules around misinformation or hate speech. President Trump has repeatedly tweeted false statements about everything from his impeachment proceedings to immigration, and he has posted media that some see as inciting violence toward political opponents. All of this has remained on Twitter because the company considers Trump’s posts newsworthy, despite calls for the company to take them down.

And Facebook (unlike Twitter and YouTube) continues to enforce a controversial policy that allows lies in political ads, such as the Trump campaign’s ad making false claims about the activities of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine. Democratic candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren has tested those boundaries by running a fake ad claiming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Donald Trump for president, meant to be a critique of the rule.

Twitter, like other major social media companies, doesn’t ban content just because it’s false or potentially misleading, but it does have a set of rules barring any content that’s considered “platform manipulation” or “spam.” A spokesperson for Twitter told Recode that the Bloomberg campaign’s specific tweets falsely quoting Sanders didn’t violate any of its current rules on the site.

If Bloomberg’s campaign had posted an edited image, like a fake screenshot (as opposed to text) of Bernie making fictitious statements, then it would likely be a violation of Twitter’s upcoming manipulated media policy that is rolling out on March 5.

The spokesperson also told Recode, “Admittedly, satire is a challenging one. Context of the content is important. As it pertains to the synthetic and manipulated media rule it is pretty well explained in the blog in that we evaluate the potential impact of the media i.e. is the content in question ‘shared in a deceptive manner.’”

Twitter’s policy is far from clear and will continue to require some subjective calls on what is and isn’t a joke. The rules on Facebook or YouTube are not much clearer because every major tech company is grappling in 2020 with how to balance users’ free speech with their ability to do harm.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg consistently (and perhaps smartly) continues to push the boundaries of these platforms’ rules — garnering criticism, but also getting free publicity.

Last Friday, Twitter suspended 70 pro-Bloomberg accounts run by people paid by the Bloomberg campaign who were posting identical tweets in favor of the candidate. Twitter said the accounts violated its policies on “platform manipulation and spam.” In this case, because the language of many of the posts were word-for-word copies of the same coordinated language, it was a clear violation of the platform’s rules.

The campaign also posted a doctored video of the last Democratic presidential debates that made it seem as though Bloomberg had an “epic mic drop” moment that stumped his opponents — even though, as my colleague Alex Ward explained, he didn’t.

The campaign has more broadly been paying people $2,500 a month to post positive content about Bloomberg on social media and text their friends about him. And it’s paying much more to big-name influencer Instagram accounts to post ironic memes about the candidate.

In every case, Bloomberg has received criticism, and in some cases, social media companies have hit the candidate with a slap on the wrist for these tactics that blur the lines between spam, misinformation, and clear advertising.

But in the end, the publicity may be well worth any criticism. Whether you agree with it or not, Bloomberg is smartly exploiting the gray areas social media companies have established around politics and free speech online. It’s a difficult problem that will only get more complicated for social media platforms as we get closer to Election Day.

TIME TO COME IN FROM THE COLD

Once Cold War heroes, ‘Miracle on Ice’ team struggles 

with backlash from donning ‘Keep America Great’ hats

 at Trump rally


'Greatest sports story': Trump praises ‘Miracle on Ice’ team
NO THAT WAS THE CANADIAN TEAM BEATING THE SOVIETS IN 1972

If he had to do it again, hockey legend Mike Eruzione said, he would not put on the red “Keep America Great” hat.

DUH OH

President Trump listens as Mike Eruzione, captain of the 1980 U.S men’s Olympic hockey team, speaks at a campaign rally on Feb. 21 in Las Vegas. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

He and his teammates from the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey squad hadn’t meant to make a grand political statement when they appeared onstage as President Trump’s surprise guests at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Friday. They happened to be in town to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the “Miracle on Ice” — their shocking upset of the Soviet Union en route to the gold medal, perhaps the most unifying moment in American sports history — when they got a call from Trump’s campaign inviting them to a private photo line with the president.

The next thing they knew, Eruzione said, Trump was introducing them at the rally and a campaign aide was handing them the caps as they took the stage. Four of the former players chose not to wear them — but 10 others did, prompting a huge backlash on social media from Trump’s critics, who view the distinctive red campaign hats as sharply politicized symbols of hate, racism and xenophobia.

“You going to light into me, too? We’re getting killed!” Eruzione said in an interview. Now serving as the director of special outreach at his alma mater, Boston University, Eruzione said he has received angry calls and messages from the school’s alumni. One said he purchased Eruzione’s new book about the 1980 team but no longer intends to read it. His Twitter mentions are a nightmare

One message read: “In 1980, you beat the Russians, and yesterday the Russians beat you.”“If we knew we were going to piss off this many people, we probably would not have put the hats on,” said Eruzione, 65, who served as the team’s captain and scored the game-winning goal against the Soviet team. “That’s the big question here. A lot of the stuff I got was, ‘You guys said it’s not political, but when you put the hats on, you made it political.’ ”

The “Miracle” team is the latest group to become entangled in the fierce cultural fight over the meaning of the Trump campaign’s most successful piece of merchandise, one that has raised tens of millions of dollars since 2016, according to Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager. Last spring, Parscale said, the campaign surpassed 1 million sales of the $25 red “Make America Great Again” hats, featuring the 2016 campaign slogan in white lettering. That was before Parscale’s team unveiled a 2020 update with the new slogan, “Keep America Great.”

Though Trump campaign officials this week declined to provide an updated tally of how many hats have been sold, their ubiquity was evident at the Las Vegas rally, where it appeared that a majority in the crowd of thousands were wearing them.

Beyond their fundraising prowess, the “MAGA” and “KAG” hats have served as potent marketing for the president’s specific brand of nationalistic, us-versus-them politics, through which he has risen to power by provoking and accentuating the nation’s deep divisions of race, ethnicity and gender.

Over the years, the hats have become suffused with the divisive rhetoric of a president whose campaign rally refrains of “Build a wall,” “Send her back” and “Lock her up” have stirred up his conservative base and outraged his liberal and moderate critics. The MAGA slogan has been impugned by critics as an implicit desire to return to an era in American history when the white male ruling class did not feel threatened by minorities and women.

“It’s hard to believe there are still people who don’t get that it means, ‘Keep America white,’ and ‘Keep America free of Mexican immigrants,’ ” said Matthew A. Sears, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick in Canada who has written critically about the Trump hats.

“When people say it’s ‘just a hat,’ and you can’t judge a book by its cover and you can’t attribute racism to it — that’s how symbols work,” Sears added. “It’s basically like a uniform: It’s a way to signal in shorthand something that stands for a whole realm of policies or positions.”Regardless of the intent of those who wear the Trump hats, they have been at the center of a number of highly charged incidents.

In November, Washington Nationals catcher Kurt Suzuki enthusiastically donned a MAGA hat during the team’s White House celebration with Trump after winning the World Series, prompting the president to physically embrace him. The scene provoked an outcry on social media from fans pledging to no longer support him, but Suzuki professed he was “just trying to have some fun” and not being political.

Two weeks ago, Trump tweeted a short clip from HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” in which comedian Larry David de-escalates a road rage confrontation with a tough-looking biker by donning a red MAGA hat. “Tough guys for Trump!” the president tweeted, though his critics quickly noted that he appeared to miss the punchline. The episode features a recurring gag in which David employs the pro-Trump accessory as a “great people repellent” in liberal Los Angeles.

Trump’s supporters have accused his critics of overreacting to the hats and, in doing so, demonstrating their own political intolerance. Some Trump supporters have been physically assaulted for wearing MAGA hats, and some restaurant owners have declined to serve anyone wearing them.

In an email, Tim Murtagh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said: “The 1980 Olympic hockey team reminds us of a time when as a nation we came together to defeat communism. It is a shame that today’s liberals are so intolerant of other political viewpoints that they threaten to cancel such great sports heroes from our history.”

But critics said the hats, which have been worn by far-right groups and white supremacists, have made racial and ethnic minorities feel intimidated.

Alexandre Bissonnette, a Canadian man who reportedly spent hours scouring Trump’s Twitter feed, was sentenced last year to 40 years in prison for killing six Muslims in a Quebec City mosque in 2017; a photograph of him wearing a MAGA hat was found on his computer.

Last summer, Jeffrey Omari, a visiting assistant professor at Gonzaga University School of Law, wrote an essay titled, “Seeing Red: A professor coexists with ‘MAGA’ in the classroom,” in which he explained his reaction to a student wearing a Trump hat.

“I was unsure whether the student was directing a hateful message toward me or if he merely lacked decorum and was oblivious to how his hat might be interpreted by his black law professor. I presumed it was the former,” wrote Omari, who is African American. “As the student sat there directly in front of me, his shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me.”

Omari said that after his piece was published in the ABA Journal, a legal trade magazine, he received so many threatening calls and emails that he stopped answering his phone and engaged campus police.

“I never anticipated the vast amounts of hate mail and threats we received,” he said.

Eruzione also expressed surprise at the outrage provoked by his appearance with Trump. A member of the president’s golf club in Jupiter, Fla., Eruzione, who said he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016, once appeared on Trump’s former reality show “Celebrity Apprentice.”

After the team took photos with him backstage in Las Vegas, Trump invited them to join him onstage. “What are you going to say?” Eruzione said. “To us it was, ‘Sure.’ ”

When he was handed the red hat, he said, “I just put it on. I wasn’t thinking. Maybe this shows I’m naive, shows I’m stupid. I don’t know. I don’t follow politics. I know he’s had some issues and said a lot of things people don’t like.”

Eruzione ruefully compared the backlash against the team with the joy in 1980 when they were hailed as heroes amid Cold War tensions. During the interview, he called up his Twitter account and began reading some of the angry tweets over the phone: “Did they have to wear those hats? … A shame on all of you for wearing those divisive, racist hats. … 40 years ago, you brought joy, but tonight it’s deep sadness.”

“I told my wife, ‘People think we are a disgrace,’ ” he said.

SAN FRANCISCO 
Feds order South Bay reservoir drained amid fears of catastrophic dam failure


By Bob Egelko and Michael Cabanatuan 

SF CHRONICLE

Video by ABC 7 San Francisco


Federal water officials have ordered Silicon Valley’s chief water supplier to start draining its largest reservoir by Oct. 1 because a major earthquake could collapse the dam and send floodwaters into communities from Monterey Bay to the southern shore of San Francisco Bay.

But Valley Water, the agency that manages the Anderson Dam and Reservoir, says it has already lowered the reservoir’s water below the level initially sought by federal officials — and that the total drainage the federal government now demands would actually make the dam more vulnerable to earthquake damage, while also reducing water supplies and causing environmental harm.

The reservoir, in a gorge 3 miles east of U.S. 101 between Morgan Hill and San Jose, is one of 10 storing water for the Santa Clara Valley Water District, now known as Valley Water. Built in 1950, it can hold 89,073 acre-feet of water, more than half of the 170,000 acre-feet stored in all of the district’s reservoirs.

Valley Water officials have known since 2008 that a 6.6 magnitude earthquake on the Calaveras Fault at the 240-foot earthen dam could cause it to collapse. Over the years, the agency has lowered water levels and reported its progress to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The reservoir, at current levels, “provides a buttressing effect” for the dam’s intake structure, Christopher Hakes, a Valley Water dam safety official, said in a Dec. 31 letter to FERC. “Lowering reservoir levels beyond the current level would decrease the structural reliability of the intake structure” and its protection against earthquakes.

FERC’s dam safety director, David Capka, was unconvinced. He ordered Hakes in a letter Thursday to drain the reservoir “as quickly as you can,” starting the process by Oct. 1 and completing it before the winter of 2021-22. In the meantime, Capka said, Valley Water can look for emergency water supplies and work with federal, state and local agencies to “minimize environmental impacts.”

“It is unacceptable to maintain the reservoir at an elevation higher than necessary when it can be reduced, thereby decreasing the risk to public safety and the large population downstream of Anderson Dam,” Capka wrote. “Your actions to date do not demonstrate an appropriate sense of urgency.” 

© Tom Stienstra, Tom Stienstra / The Chronicle

Coyote Creek downstream of the outlet from Anderson Dam near Morgan Hill west of U.S. 101.

In response, Valley Water’s chief executive, Norma Camacho, said in a statement Monday that “the demand to empty Anderson Reservoir could result in unsafe consequences.”

But the local district lacks authority to defy federal regulators. Valley Water spokesman Matt Keller said the district’s Board of Directors would address the issue shortly.

The district is due to start work in 2022 on a five-year earthquake retrofit for the dam. Camacho said legislation has been introduced in Sacramento to speed up the regulatory process for the retrofit.

The district reduced the storage level of the reservoir to 68% of capacity in 2008, then to 58%. It says it has now lowered the level to 45 feet above drainage, 10 feet below the level demanded by Capka in December.

Still, a spillover from the dam during heavy rains three years ago sent water pouring down Coyote Creek and into San Jose, inundating neighborhoods in one of the region’s worst floods in decades.

The district has alternate sources of water, including the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project, which combined furnish more than half its supply, along with groundwater.

But Camacho, the chief executive, said draining the reservoir would not only be unsafe but also environmentally destructive.

“The inability to keep a consistent flow in Coyote Creek downstream of the dam year-round would significantly impact sensitive native fish, amphibians, reptiles, wetlands, and riparian habitats,” she said. “Water quality could also be significantly impacted downstream of the dam.”

The dispute coincided with, but was apparently unrelated to, the latest round of water wars between the Trump administration and California.

On Thursday, the state sued the federal government over new rules that supply more water to Central Valley farmers by increasing pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The suit said the diversion violates environmental laws and would harm salmon and other endangered fish in the delta estuary.

SOUTH CAROLINA DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY DEBATE LOSERS

WASHINGTON POST PICKS THE BIGGEST LOSERS

 MSNBC MODERATORS 

CANNOT RUN A DEBATE (PROVEN YET AGAIN, AD NAUSEUM)

The moderators: There were two big problems here. One was that this was a complete free-for-all for much of the debate, with candidates talking over one another and no one enforcing the rules. Playing loose can work when it means the candidates actually debate, but many times Tuesday night, they were just allowed to talk past the moderators and game the system. The Post’s Josh Dawsey said it well:

And second — and speaking of gaming the system — was that the booing and cheering were out of control. There is a reason many debates prohibit outward shows of support or dissent: Because it encourages people to stock the room and play to the cameras. We don’t yet know if that’s what happened Tuesday, but Bloomberg’s supporters were especially vocal, and Sanders found himself booed a surprising amount, given he’s competing for a South Carolina win.

Meet the moderators of the South Carolina Democratic debate

Seven candidates take the stage ahead of the state’s primary this week

By Li Zhouli@vox.com Feb 25, 2020

Gayle King attends as ViacomCBS Inc. rings the opening

 bell at the Nasdaq on December 5, 2019, in New York City. 

John Lamparski/Getty Images


Journalists from CBS News will moderate the 10th Democratic debate in Charleston, South Carolina on Tuesday, February 25. The debate, which the network is co-hosting with the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, will air just days before Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

The network’s moderators will be CBS Evening News’s Norah O’Donnell, CBS This Morning’s Gayle King, Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, CBS’s chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett, and 60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker.

The effects of the debate could be significant: A sizable chunk of voters made their decisions in the last few days before the New Hampshire primary and cited the debate before the race as an important factor. The same dynamic could play out in South Carolina, where there is absentee voting but no formal early voting.

The criteria to qualify for this debate was very similar to the requirements for the Nevada debate: Candidates needed to hit a 10 percent polling threshold in at least four Democratic National Committee-sanctioned polls, or 12 percent in two South Carolina polls released between February 4 and February 24. They could also qualify for the debate by winning one delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the Iowa, New Hampshire, or Nevada races.

Seven candidates have qualified: Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar; former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Vice President Joe Biden; and billionaire activist Tom Steyer.

The moderators, who will play a major role in shaping the night’s conversation, all cover politics in different capacities at CBS:
Norah O’Donnell is an anchor of the daily CBS Evening News program and the network’s election specials.
Gayle King is a host of the daily CBS This Morning program. She’s also editor-at-large of O, The Oprah Magazine and longtime best friends with Oprah.
Margaret Brennan is the network’s senior foreign affairs correspondent and the moderator of the weekly Face the Nation program.
Major Garrett is the chief Washington correspondent for CBS News.
Bill Whitaker is a correspondent for the weekly 60 Minutes program.
The Democratic National Committee is making a concerted effort to increase the diversity of debate moderators

The DNC has made a commitment to increase the diversity of debate moderators in the 2020 cycle and has mandated that at least one person of color and one woman serve as a moderator in every debate.

Given how historically white and male the debate space has been, greater diversity among moderators has been a priority for advocacy groups including NARAL, Emily’s List, and Color of Change.

In an open letter last spring, the groups urged media outlets and other organizations to ensure that at least 50 percent of the moderators running the debates were women and at least 50 percent were people of color. UltraViolet, an organization dedicated to gender equity, spearheaded the letter, which also called out sexism in political media coverage writ large.

Though the roster of moderators hasn’t always hit activists’ bar thus far, the DNC has lived up to its pledge. It began the debates in Miami last June with a diverse group of moderators. The 10th debate will continue that trend: Of the five moderators, three are women and two are people of color.